Insist Famous Quotes

Fame is not so impossible for people with charisma, passion and talent. Being famous just means you have fans, and even one or two is enough to make you someone special. Ask a music fan who the best guitarist of all time is, and while one group insists that it was Jimmi Hendrix, another group swears that it was Eddie Van Halen instead. There will never be a time when everyone on this planet agrees on something like that, but luckily that's not important. All that matters is that both sides remain loyal, which they will assuming you continue to be who you are and do your thing. This is all that you need to be immortalized.

To the people who insist they really do have a great idea but they just can't write, I'd say that given some of the books I've read, or at least started to read, it would appear that not being able to write is absolutely no obstacle whatsoever to writing a book and securing a publishing contract. Though becoming famous in some other field first may help.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

But as it turned out, the two had a great deal in common, for both Bailey and Thackeray (named for the famous novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair) were devoted bibliophiles who believed that "a book a day kept the world at bay," as Thackeray was fond of saying. Bailey was the offspring of a generation of badgers who insisted that "Reader" was the most rewarding vocation to which a virtuous badger might be called and who gauged their week's anticipated pleasure by the height of their to-be-read pile. (Perhaps you know people like this. I do.)

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

But what I would like to know," says Albert, "is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No." "I'm sure there would," I interject, "he was against it from the first." "Well, if not him alone, then perhaps if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No." "That's probable," I agree, "but they damned well said Yes." "It's queer, when one thinks about it," goes on Kropp, "we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?" "Perhaps both," say I without believing it. "Yes, well now," pursues Albert, and I see that he means to drive me into a corner, "but our professors and parsons and newspapers say that we are the only ones that are right, and let's hope so;--but the French professors and parsons and newspapers say that the right is on their side, now what about that?" "That I don't know," I say, "but whichever way it is there's war all the same and every month more countries coming in." Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." "Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?" growls Kropp, "I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other--" "Then I haven't any business here at all," replies Tjaden, "I don't feel myself offended." "Well, let me tell you," says Albert sourly, "it doesn't apply to tramps like you." "Then I can be going home right away," retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh, "Ach, man! he means the people as a whole, the State--" exclaims Mller. "State, State"--Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously, "Gendarmes, police, taxes, that's your State;--if that's what you are talking about, no, thank you." "That's right," says Kat, "you've said something for once, Tjaden. State and home-country, there's a big difference." "But they go together," insists Kropp, "without the State there wouldn't be any home-country." "True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren't asked about it any more than we were." "Then what exactly is the war for?" asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. "There must be some people to whom the war is useful." "Well, I'm not one of them," grins Tjaden. "Not you, nor anybody else here." "Who are they then?" persists Tjaden. "It isn't any use to the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already." "I'm not so sure about that," contradicts Kat, "he has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books." "And generals too," adds Detering, "they become famous through war." "Even more famous than emperors," adds Kat. "There are other people back behind there who profit by the war, that's certain," growls Detering. "I think it is more of a kind of fever," says Albert. "No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing--and yet half the world is in it all the same.

Plutarch clearly notes that her beauty “was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it”. It was rather the “contact of her presence, if you lived with her, that was irresistible”. Her personality and manner, he insists, were no less than “bewitching”. Time has done better than fail to wither Cleopatra’s case; it has improved upon her allure. She came into her looks only years later. By the third century AD she would be described as “striking”, exquisite in appearance. By the Middle Ages, she was “famous for nothing but her beauty”.

In his early twenties, a man started collecting paintings, many of which later became famous: Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. Over the decades he amassed a wonderful collection. Eventually, the man’s beloved son was drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam, where he died while trying to save his friend. About a month after the war ended, a young man knocked on the devastated father’s door. “Sir,” he said, “I know that you like great art, and I have brought you something not very great.” Inside the package, the father found a portrait of his son. With tears running down his cheeks, the father said, “I want to pay you for this.ℍ “No,” the young man replied, “he saved my life. You don’t owe me anything.ℍ The father cherished the painting and put it in the center of his collection. Whenever people came to visit, he made them look at it. When the man died, his art collection went up for sale. A large crowd of enthusiastic collectors gathered. First up for sale was the amateur portrait. A wave of displeasure rippled through the crowd. “Let’s forget about that painting!” one said. “We want to bid on the valuable ones,” said another. Despite many loud complaints, the auctioneer insisted on starting with the portrait. Finally, the deceased man’s gardener said, “I’ll bid ten dollars.ℍ Hearing no further bids, the auctioneer called out, “Sold for ten dollars!” Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. But then the auctioneer said, “And that concludes the auction.” Furious gasps shook the room. The auctioneer explained, “Let me read the stipulation in the will: “Sell the portrait of my son first, and whoever buys it gets the entire art collection. Whoever takes my son gets everything.ℍ It’s the same way with God Almighty. Whoever takes his Son gets everything.

The famous ones kept going, video, photos, headlines, and here they still are, running countries, pressing buttons, standing in offices insisting that all the money in the world belongs to them, pushing secrets through votes, starving the bottom so the top can feast

The Age Of Reason 1. ‘Well, it’s that same frankness you fuss about so much. You’re so absurdly scared of being your own dupe, my poor boy, that you would back out of the finest adventure in the world rather than risk telling yourself a lie.’ 2. “ I’m not so much interested in myself as all that’ he said simply. ‘I know’, said Marcelle. It isn’t an aim , it’s a means. It helps you to get rid of yourself; to contemplate and criticize yourself: that’s the attitude you prefer. When you look at yourself, you imagine you aren’t what you see, you imagine you are nothing. That is your ideal: you want to be nothing.’’ 3. ‘In vain he repeated the once inspiring phrase: ‘I must be free: I must be self-impelled, and able to say: ‘’I am because I will: I am my own beginning.’’ Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.’ 4. ‘He had waited so long: his later years had been no more than a stand-to. Oppressed with countless daily cares, he had waited…But through all that, his sole care had been to hold himself in readiness. For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence….He waited. And during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they had grasped him from behind….’ 5. ‘ ‘It was love. This time, it was love. And Mathiue thought:’ What have I done?’ Five minutes ago this love didn’t exist; there was between them a rare and precious feeling, without a name and not expressible in gestures.’ 6. ‘ The fact is, you are beyond my comprehension: you, so prompt with your indignation when you hear of an injustice, you keep this woman for years in a humiliating position, for the sole pleasure of telling yourself that you are respecting your principles. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, if you really did adapt your life to your ideas. But, I must tell you once more…you like that sort of life-placid, orderly, the typical life of an official.’ ‘’That freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one’s responsibilities.’ ‘Well…perhaps I’m doing you an injustice. Perhaps you haven’t in fact reached the age of reason, it’s really a moral age…perhaps I’ve got there sooner than you have.’ 7. ‘ I have nothing to defend. I am not proud of my life and I’m penniless. My freedom? It’s a burden to me, for years past I have been free and to no purpose. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound of certainty….Besides, I agree with you that no one can be a man who has not discovered something for which he is prepared to die.’ 8. ‘‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘ A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides, what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistering trail behind it.’ 9.’’ A life’, thought Mathieu, ‘is formed from the future just like the bodies are compounded from the void’. He bent his head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he has said:’I will be free’, the day when he had said: ’I will be famous’, appeared to him even now with their individual future, like a small, circled individual sky above them all, and the future was himself, himself just as he was at present, weary and a little over-ripe, they had claims upon him across the passage of time past, they maintained their insistencies, and he was often visited by attacks of devastating remorse, because his casual, cynical present was the original future of those past days.

During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

The frenzied hypernatalism of the women's magazines alone (and that includes People, Us, and InStyle), with their endless parade of perfect, "sexy" celebrity moms who've had babies, adopted babies, been to sperm banks, frozen their eggs for future use, hatched frozen eggs, had more babies, or adopted a small Tibetan village all to satisfy their "baby lust," is enough to make you want to get your tubes tied. (These profiles always insist that celebs all love being "moms" much, much more than they do their work, let alone being rich and famous, and that they'd spend every second with their kids if they didn't have that pesky blockbuster movie to finish.)

This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion. In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In wandering through the forests of ignorance, one necessarily fell upon the famous old bear that scared children at play; but, even had the animal shown more logic than its victim, one had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic -- the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of educations had found their end. Generation after generation of painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in company with the most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a logical highroad of escape.

Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material of some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and in the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the rush of blood to the face, a snub, that least of all ... I've known men like that, men who were nobody yet who had that same immense fear of their own history, of what might be told and what, therefore, they might tell too. Of their blotted, ugly history. But, I insist, the determining factor always comes from outside, from something external: all this has little to do with shame, regret, remorse, self-hatred although these might make a fleeting appearance at some point. These individuals only feel obliged to give a true account of their acts or omissions, good or bad, brave, contemptible, cowardly or generous, if other people (the majority, that is) know about them, and those acts or omissions are thus encorporated into what is known about them, that is, into their official portraits. It isn't really a matter of conscience, but of performance, of mirrors. One can easily cast doubt on what is reflected in mirrors, and believe that it was all illusory, wrap it up in a mist of diffuse or faulty memory and decide finally that it didn't happen and that there is no memory of it, because there is no memory of what did not take place. Then it will no longer torment them: some people have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what happened didn't happen and what didn't exist did.

In famous speeches such as “Message to the Grassroots” and “Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm did not eschew politics. Rather, he suggested that Black people use their voting rights to develop an alternative power base. He remained deeply critical of the traditional Civil Rights leadership but advocated for a Black united front in which various political currents could contend. He also insisted on making self-defense a reality, not just a slogan, and held out the idea that a Black Nationalist army might eventually form if the Black masses were not given full rights.

The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

But soon Flush became aware of the more profound differences that distinguish Pisa—it was in Pisa that they were now settled—from London. The dogs were different. In London he could scarcely trot round to the pillar-box without meeting some pug dog, retriever, bulldog, mastiff, collie, Newfoundland, St. Bernard, fox terrier or one of the seven famous families of the Spaniel tribe. To each he gave a different name, and to each a different rank. But here in Pisa, though dogs abounded, there were no ranks; all—could it be possible?—were mongrels. As far as he could see, they were dogs merely—grey dogs, yellow dogs, brindled dogs, spotted dogs; but it was impossible to detect a single spaniel, collie, retriever or mastiff among them. Had the Kennel Club, then, no jurisdiction in Italy? Was the Spaniel Club unknown? Was there no law which decreed death to the topknot, which cherished the curled ear, protected the feathered foot, and insisted absolutely that the brow must be domed but not pointed? Apparently not. Flush felt himself like a prince in exile. He was the sole aristocrat among a crowd of canaille. He was the only pure-bred cocker spaniel in the whole of Pisa.

What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto

State and home-country, there’s a big difference.” “But they go together,” insists Kropp, “without the State there wouldn’t be any home-country.” “True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French black-smith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us. They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.” “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.” “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden. “Not you, nor anybody else here.” “Who are they then?” persists Tjaden. “It isn’t any use to the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already.” “I’m not so sure about that,” contradicts Kat, “he has not had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You look in your school books.” “And generals too,” adds Detering, “they become famous through war.” “Even more famous than emperors,” adds Kat. “There are other people back behind there who profit by the war, that’s certain,” growls Detering.

In the late nineteenth century, many educated Indians were taught the same lesson by their British masters. One famous anecdote tells of an ambitious Indian who mastered the intricacies of the English language, took lessons in Western-style dance, and even became accustomed to eating with a knife and fork. Equipped with his new manners, he travelled to England, studied law at University College London, and became a qualified barrister. Yet this young man of law, bedecked in suit and tie, was thrown off a train in the British colony of South Africa for insisting on travelling first class instead of settling for third class, where ‘coloured’ men like him were supposed to ride. His name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Although Lasaraleen had said she was dying to hear Aravis's story, she showed no sign of really wanting to hear it at all. She was, in fact, much better at talking than at listening. She insisted on Aravis having a long and luxurious bath (Calormene baths are famous) and then dressing her up in the finest clothes before she would let her explain anything. The fuss she made about choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad. She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming. You will guess that each thought the other silly. But when at last they were both seated after a meal (it was chiefly of the whipped cream and jelly and fruit and ice sort) in a beautiful pillared room (which Aravis would have liked better if Lasaraleen's spoiled pet monkey hadn't been climbing about it all the time) Lasaraleen at last asked her why she was running away from home.

And what about Hillel’s famous dictum (which, like Pascal’s, has been beaten to death)? Did Hillel not ask, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I understood, of course. I listened respectfully to the rabbis and hospital chaplains. But I remembered my old friend Benny Lévy, the French Maoist leader and personal secretary to Sartre who turned to the study of the Torah, inviting me to ponder the rest of Hillel’s saying. Yes, of course, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But Hillel followed that immediately by asking, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”2 Notice that Hillel said “what,” not “who.” He wanted us to understand clearly that if I am “only for me,” I become a “what,” a neutral being without qualities, a half-being, a thing. If I graze in the meadow of this me, he insisted, if I confine myself within the me-substance and the persevering ego (a specialty of the West that Covid-19 has raised to the Pantheon), then I am not much of anything; I am a subject without a predicate, a thing without qualification. I place myself under the tyranny of the object. Did someone say “the cult of me”?

It is now long since the women of England arrogated, universally, a title which once belonged to nobility only, and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of "Lady,"6 which properly corresponds only to the title of "Lord." I do not blame them for this; but only for their narrow motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but the office and duty signified by it. Lady means "bread-giver" or "loaf-giver," and Lord means "maintainer of laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which is maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given to the household, but to law maintained for the multitude, and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal claim to her title only so far as she communicates that help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women once, ministering to Him of their substance, were permitted to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread.

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.

Hilly Brown was trying to cope with the idea that, for the first time in his life, he had failed at something he really wanted to do. He had been pleased with the applause and congratulations, and he was not so self-deprecating as to mistake honest praise for politeness. But there was a stony part of him—the part which, under other circumstances, might have made him a great artist—which was not satisfied with honest praise. Honest praise, this stony part insisted, was what the bundlers of the world heaped on the heads of the barely competent. In short, honest praise was not enough… “What do you want, Hilly!?” [his mother] would have cried, throwing up her hands. “Dis-honest praise?” Ev, who saw much, and David, who saw more, could have told her. He wanted to make their eyes get so big they looked like they were going to fall out. He wanted to make the girls scream, and the boys yell... He would have traded all the honest praise and genuine applause in the world for just one scream, one belly-laugh, one woman fainting dead away like the booklet says they did when Harry Houdini did his famous milk-can escape. Because honest praise means you only got good. When they scream and laugh and faint, that means you got great. But he suspected—no, he knew—that he was never going to get great, and all the want in the world wasn’t going to change that fact. It was a bitter blow—not the failure itself, so much as the knowing it couldn’t be changed. It was like the end of Santa Clause, in a way.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

One day Billy’s kindergarten teacher phoned me at work. In a grave tone of voice she informed me Billy had been involved in a serious incident at school. She refused to elaborate but insisted I come to the school for a disciplinary meeting. My mind raced as I drove to the school. I wondered what type of behavior could possibly land a five-year-old in such hot water. When I arrived at the school, the teacher ushered me into a private office. Billy sat next to me—he looked scared. We both faced the grim faced teacher. She reminded me of the woman in the famous painting, “American Gothic.” She sat rigidly behind her desk, her eyes unblinking. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a criminal court proceeding. “Maybe Billy had accidentally killed someone.” I thought. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence. The teacher’s face was stiff and emotionless. Finally, her lips moved and she intoned, “Billy, tell your father what you did.” Under the disapproving gaze of his teacher, Billy began his confession. “Well, I was eating lunch next to Suzy. We had green Jell-O. It was jiggling around. Suzy bent down to look at her Jell-O real close, and I … pushed her face into it.” I barely choked off a belly laugh and quickly looked away, struggling for control. Somehow I sensed that Billy’s straitlaced teacher would frown upon me laughing uncontrollably about this issue. With Zenlike concentration, I mastered my emotions and turned to face my son. My expression was serious, my tone was stern, my acting was impeccable, “Billy, how do you think that made Suzy feel?” “Bad.” said Billy. “That’s right.” I said. “I don’t want you to ever do such a thing again. Do you understand?” “Yes.” Billy meekly replied. I looked at the teacher. She seemed disappointed I hadn’t tortured my son with hot irons. Reluctantly, the she allowed us to leave. This incident was representative of many child-rearing situations I dealt with over the years.

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all. By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words. To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

Spaghetti alla puttanesca is typically made with tomatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic. It means, literally, "spaghetti in the style of a prostitute." It is a sloppy dish, the tomatoes and oil making the spaghetti lubricated and slippery. It is the sort of sauce that demands you slurp the noodles Goodfellas style, staining your cheeks with flecks of orange and red. It is very salty and very tangy and altogether very strong; after a small plate, you feel like you've had a visceral and significant experience. There are varying accounts as to when and how the dish originated- but the most likely explanation is that it became popular in the mid-twentieth century. The first documented mention of it is in Raffaele La Capria's 1961 novel, Ferito a Morte. According to the Italian Pasta Makers Union, spaghetti alla puttanesca was a very popular dish throughout the sixties, but its exact genesis is not quite known. Sandro Petti, a famous Napoli chef and co-owner of Ischian restaurant Rangio Fellone, claims to be its creator. Near closing time one evening, a group of customers sat at one of his tables and demanded to be served a meal. Running low on ingredients, Petti told them he didn't have enough to make anything, but they insisted. They were tired, and they were hungry, and they wanted pasta. "Facci una puttanata qualsiasi!" they cried. "Make any kind of garbage!" The late-night eater is not usually the most discerning. Petti raided the kitchen, finding four tomatoes, two olives, and a jar of capers, the base of the now-famous spaghetti dish; he included it on his menu the next day under the name spaghetti alla puttanesca. Others have their own origin myths. But the most common theory is that it was a quick, satisfying dish that the working girls of Naples could knock up with just a few key ingredients found at the back of the fridge- after a long and unforgiving night. As with all dishes containing tomatoes, there are lots of variations in technique. Some use a combination of tinned and fresh tomatoes, while others opt for a squirt of puree. Some require specifically cherry or plum tomatoes, while others go for a smooth, premade pasta. Many suggest that a teaspoon of sugar will "open up the flavor," though that has never really worked for me. I prefer fresh, chopped, and very ripe, cooked for a really long time. Tomatoes always take longer to cook than you think they will- I rarely go for anything less than an hour. This will make the sauce stronger, thicker, and less watery. Most recipes include onions, but I prefer to infuse the oil with onions, frying them until brown, then chucking them out. I like a little kick in most things, but especially in pasta, so I usually go for a generous dousing of chili flakes. I crush three or four cloves of garlic into the oil, then add any extras. The classic is olives, anchovies, and capers, though sometimes I add a handful of fresh spinach, which nicely soaks up any excess water- and the strange, metallic taste of cooked spinach adds an interesting extra dimension. The sauce is naturally quite salty, but I like to add a pinch of sea or Himalayan salt, too, which gives it a slightly more buttery taste, as opposed to the sharp, acrid salt of olives and anchovies. I once made this for a vegetarian friend, substituting braised tofu for anchovies. Usually a solid fish replacement, braised tofu is more like tuna than anchovy, so it was a mistake for puttanesca. It gave the dish an unpleasant solidity and heft. You want a fish that slips and melts into the pasta, not one that dominates it. In terms of garnishing, I go for dried oregano or fresh basil (never fresh oregano or dried basil) and a modest sprinkle of cheese. Oh, and I always use spaghetti. Not fettuccine. Not penne. Not farfalle. Not rigatoni. Not even linguine. Always spaghetti.

. The rather boring debate about the origins of Maoism (or Stalinism) oscillates around three main options: (1) the "hard" anti-Communists and the "hard" partisans of Stalinism claim that there is a direct immanent logic which leads from Marx to Lenin and from Lenin to Stalin (and then from Stalin to Mao); (2) the "soft" critics claim that the Stalinist (or, prior to it, Leninist) turn is one of the historical possibilities present in Marx's theoretical edifice - it could have turned otherwise, yet the Stalinist catastrophe is nonetheless inscribed as an option into the original theory itself; (3) finally, the defenders of the purity of the "original teaching of Marx" dismiss Stalinism (or already Leninism) as a simple distortion, betrayal, insisting on the radical break between the two: Lenin and Stalin simply "kidnapped" Marx's theory and used it for purposes totally at odds with Marx. One should reject all three versions as based on the same underlying linear-historicist notion of time, and opt for the fourth version, beyond the false question "to what extent was Marx responsible for the Stalinist catastrophe": Marx is fully responsible, but retroactively, i.e., the same holds for Stalin as for Kafka in Borges's famous formulation: they both created their own predecessors.

Experimentation also proved serendipitous for Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, when they were putting together the Stone Brewing Co. in Escondido, California, north of San Diego. It was destined to become one of the most successful brewing startups of the 1990s. In The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. Koch and Wagner confess that the home-brewed ale that became Arrogant Bastard Ale and propelled Stone to fame in the craft brewing world, started with a mistake. Greg Koch recalls that Wagner exclaimed “Aw, hell!” as he brewed an ale on his brand spanking new home-brewing system. “I miscalculated and added the ingredients in the wrong percentages,” he told Koch. “And not just a little. There’s a lot of extra malt and hops in there.” Koch recalls suggesting they dump it, but Wagner decided to let it ferment and see what it tasted like. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, founders of Stone Brewery. Photograph © Stone Brewing Co. They both loved the resulting hops bomb, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Koch was sure that nobody was “going to be able to handle it. I mean, we both loved it, but it was unlike anything else that was out there. We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it, but we knew we had to do something with it somewhere down the road.”20 Koch said the beer literally introduced itself as Arrogant Bastard Ale. It seemed ironic to me that a beer from southern California, the world of laid back surfers, should produce an ale with a name that many would identify with New York City. But such are the ironies of the craft brewing revolution. Arrogant Bastard was relegated to the closet for the first year of Stone Brewing Co.’s existence. The founders figured their more commercial brew would be Stone Pale Ale, but its first-year sales figures were not strong, and the company’s board of directors decided to release Arrogant Bastard. “They thought it would help us have more of a billboard effect; with more Stone bottles next to each other on a retail shelf, they become that much more visible, and it sends a message that we’re a respected, established brewery with a diverse range of beers,” Wagner writes. Once they decided to release the Arrogant Bastard, they decided to go all out. The copy on the back label of Arrogant Bastard has become famous in the beer world: Arrogant Bastard Ale Ar-ro-gance (ar’ogans) n. The act or quality of being arrogant; haughty; Undue assumption; overbearing conceit. This is an aggressive ale. You probably won’t like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory—maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beverage will give you more sex appeal. The label continues along these lines for a couple of hundred words. Some call it a brilliant piece of reverse psychology. But Koch insists he was just listening to the beer that had emerged from a mistake in Wagner’s kitchen. In addition to innovative beers and marketing, Koch and Wagner have also made their San Diego brewery a tourist destination, with the Stone Brewing Bistro & Gardens, with plans to add a hotel to the Stone empire.

because "Gresham's Law" proves that "bad money drives out good" from circulation. Hence, the free market cannot be trusted to serve the public in supplying good money. But this formulation rests on a misinterpretation of Gresham`s famous law. The law really says that "money overvalued artificially by government will drive out of circulation artificially undervalued money." Suppose, for example, there are one-ounce gold coins in circulation. After a few years of wear and tear, let us say that some coins weigh only .9 ounces. Obviously, on the free market, the worn coins would circulate at only ninety percent of the value of the full-bodied coins, and the nominal face-value of the former would have to be repudiated. If anything, it will be the "bad" coins that will be driven from the market. But suppose the government decrees that everyone must treat the worn coins as equal to new, fresh coins, and must accept them equally in payment of debts. What has the government really done? It has imposed price control by coercion on the "exchange rate" between the two types of coin. By insisting on the par-ratio when the worn coins should exchange at ten percent discount, it artificially overvalues the worn coins and undervalues new coins. Consequently, everyone will circulate the worn coins, and hoard or export the new. "Bad money drives out good money," then, not on the free market, but as the direct result of governmental intervention in the market.

Fortey asserts that the beginning of the Cambrian “saw the sudden appearance in the fossil record of almost all the main types of animals (phyla) that still dominate the biota today.” He concedes that there are a variety of fossils in older strata, but insist that “they are either very small (such as bacteria and algae) or their relationships to the living fauna are highly contentious, as is the case with the famous soft-bodied fossils from the late Precambrian Pound Quartzite, Ediacara, South Australia.”24

Why on earth,” he insists, “would they have veiled their truths, delving into the depths of some cryptic language, when they lived in a largely illiterate society.

The father of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, recognized and feared the inflexibility of religion in politics in 1994 when he famously insisted, “If and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.

Madame Egloff, who stood, hands held out in front of her, expressing her admiration. ‘Please make the alterations, Madame, and have the gowns sent round to Brown’s Hotel by the weekend.’ Half an hour later, when they left Madame Egloff’s salon, Sophie had been dressed and pinned into each of the garments Matty had chosen, and promises had been made to deliver the clothes to the hotel by Saturday morning at the latest. * Monday morning saw them at Paddington Station being conducted to a private compartment on the train. Sophie had never travelled in such style before, being more used to the uncomfortable rowdiness of a third-class carriage, but Matty had insisted. ‘I always travel this way,’ she said. ‘The journey is quite tiring enough without being crammed in next to crying children and shrill women.’ Having directed the porter to place their luggage in the guard’s van, Matty had settled herself into their compartment with a copy of the new Murray’s Magazine, which she had bought from a news-stand at the station. Beside her on the seat was a hamper, provided by Brown’s, with the food and drink they would need for the journey. As the train drew out of the station and started its long journey west, Sophie felt keyed up with anxious anticipation and was grateful for the comforting presence of Hannah, ensconced on the other side of the compartment. Dressed in her new plaid travelling dress, with a matching hat perched on her head, Sophie knew she was a different person from the one who had sat at her dying mother’s bedside, holding her hand. No longer a young girl on the brink of adulthood... but who? There had been too much change in her life in the past weeks that she still had to come to terms with. Who am I? she wondered. I don’t feel like me! She looked across at Hannah, so familiar, so safe, huddled in a corner, her eyes shut as she dozed, and Sophie felt a wave of affection flood through her. Dear Hannah, she thought, I’m so glad you came too. When they had left Madame Egloff, Matty had taken Sophie for afternoon tea at Brown’s. Looking round the famous tea room, with its panelled walls, its alcoved fireplace and its windows giving onto Albemarle Street, Sophie

We’re eight around the table. After we finish the soup the others stop talking, and she and I carry on. We’re discussing a film, which I liked, so I defend it. But she insists that the actor, a famous leading man, gave a terrible performance. Though I’m not drunk I can’t help it, I say: “Do you realize you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about?” She doesn’t reply, and after that she erases me out of her evening. The others exchange embarrassed glances. I’ve never exploded like that at a small dinner among friends. The husband looks at me, gelid.

For some male intellectuals, a regrettable aspect of popular newspapers was that they encouraged women. In the Nietzschean tradition the emancipation and education of women were signs of modern shallowness. The man who has depth, Nietzsche pronounces, can think of women only in an ‘oriental way’. Thus Spake Zarathustra contains the famous advice ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’18 Northcliffe, by contrast, started a new trend among newspaper proprietors by considering women readers worthy of attention. In 1891 he launched a cheap illustrated women’s weekly, Forget-Me-Not, which achieved a circulation of over 140,000 in three years, and paved the way for the highly successful Home Chat. He also insisted on two columns of articles devoted to women’s concerns in the Daily Mail.

A young reporter for the Post named Tom Wolfe followed up after my talk with an interview. The Post ran his story, “You Can So Beat the Gambling House at Blackjack, Math Expert Insists.” He was curious rather than skeptical, sympathetic but probing. Wolfe later became one of America’s most famous authors.

I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner's legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful, twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap. I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I'd insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she'd been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times she'd ignored my advice. I was glad that she hadn't overworked herself to get some fancy business school degree. That she'd gone off for a lost weekend with a semi-famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she'd made it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had lived in ways that I had not.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

Innovation amateurs talk good ideas,” he says. “Innovation experts talk testable hypotheses,” A hypothesis, embodied as a prototype, beats market research because it can be tested. The word prototype comes from the Greek words protos and typos, meaning “first form.” Customers don’t have to imagine how they would feel when they see a prototype. They’re already feeling it. Steve Jobs, although famous for rejecting market research, insisted that Apple designers make and test hundreds of prototypes before deciding on the final form of a new product.

Nietzsche’s most famous views are his earliest ones: the accounts of the Apollonian and Dionysian “art-drives” (Kunsttrieben) in The Birth of Tragedy. Already there, let’s note, Nietzsche is explaining aesthetic experience by “drives”. But in that first book these drives are mainly thought of in Schopenhauer’s way, as manifestations of a metaphysical, noumenal will. This early aesthetics is premised as responding to this noumenal reality: both Apollonian and Dionysian art drives are ways of coping with that reality of Schopenhauerian will. But Nietzsche soon insists on thinking of drives scientifically—not only of what they are (the body’s abilities), but of why we have them (evolution by selection)... It’s in aesthetics that this step into naturalism moves Nietzsche furthest from Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer had depicted our aesthetic experience as (unlike intellect) genuinely a disengagement from willing: it really achieves the objectivity we only thought we could have in our science. But Nietzsche insists that it too expresses a (naturalized) will and drive—and “serves life” by making us more fit. As such, the aesthetic attitude is not “disinterested” or “disengaged” at all, as not just Schopenhauer but Kant had found it. Nietzsche now scorns their notion of it. The aesthetic attitude in fact involves a heightening of our engagement and feeling. These drives, in which art and aesthetic experience are ultimately rooted, are something ancient and fixed in us. Indeed, artistic drives have been designed into all organisms. They were set into our bodies and our “blood” in our presocietal deep history, and persist there today beneath the layers of customs and habits that societies have superimposed on them (to exploit them, or counteract them, or both). By acting on these drives, beauty works on the “animal” in us—directly on the body, on the “muscles and senses” (WP809 [1888]), and the drives embedded in them. Our bodies themselves have a taste for certain kinds of beauty—above all the beauty of human bodies.

The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state’s bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost of attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity.

George Washington had said that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” John Adams had insisted that public virtue, “the only foundation of republics,” could not “exist in a nation without private” virtue. Alexander Hamilton had written that “virtue and honor” were the “foundation of confidence” that underpinned “the institution of delegated power.” The contemporary Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had famously declared that “society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.” Trump had said to hell with all that. And he had gotten elected anyway. It’s true that many presidents seem petty when measured against the founders. But Trump was different even from prior unsavory men who had attained the presidency. They had at least feigned that they cared about these values and expectations. Trump had campaigned against them and won on that basis.

Nietzsche’s most famous views are his earliest ones: the accounts of the Apollonian and Dionysian “art-drives” (Kunsttrieben) in The Birth of Tragedy. Already there, let’s note, Nietzsche is explaining aesthetic experience by “drives”. But in that first book these drives are mainly thought of in Schopenhauer’s way, as manifestations of a metaphysical, noumenal will. This early aesthetics is premised as responding to this noumenal reality: both Apollonian and Dionysian art drives are ways of coping with that reality of Schopenhauerian will. But Nietzsche soon insists on thinking of drives scientifically—not only of what they are (the body’s abilities), but of why we have them (evolution by selection)... It’s in aesthetics that this step into naturalism moves Nietzsche furthest from Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer had depicted our aesthetic experience as (unlike intellect) genuinely a disengagement from willing: it really achieves the objectivity we only thought we could have in our science. But Nietzsche insists that it too expresses a (naturalized) will and drive—and “serves life” by making us more fit. As such, the aesthetic attitude is not “disinterested” or “disengaged” at all, as not just Schopenhauer but Kant had found it. Nietzsche now scorns their notion of it. The aesthetic attitude in fact involves a heightening of our engagement and feeling. These drives, in which art and aesthetic experience are ultimately rooted, are something ancient and fixed in us. Indeed, artistic drives have been designed into all organisms. They were set into our bodies and our “blood” in our presocietal deep history, and persist there today beneath the layers of customs and habits that societies have superimposed on them (to exploit them, or counteract them, or both). By acting on these drives, beauty works on the “animal” in us—directly on the body, on the “muscles and senses” (WP809 [1888]), and the drives embedded in them. Our bodies themselves have a taste for certain kinds of beauty—above all the beauty of human bodies.

Excuse me but where are the dryers?' Alice asked. 'Erm, the sun.' Molly pointed out of the window at several long clotheslines. 'What, we have to carry our wet clothes all the way out there and hang them up ourselves?' 'Yes, you do.' 'That's an outrage; I am from the famous Smithers family, I can't be expected to do such a thing. I insist that the servants do my washing for me and carry it outside.' Molly waved her wand in the air and pointed it at Alice as she said, 'Strideo!' Alice immediately shrunk down, and her clothes fell into a pile on the floor.  A squeaking sound came from within the pile of clothes and a white mouse with brown patches on it scurried out by Stef's feet, causing her to let out a shriek and jump back. 'I probably shouldn't have done that, but she was driving me crazy.' Molly shrugged, and all the other girls looked at her…shocked. Charlotte bent down and picked up Alice, cupping her in her hands.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

Whatever.” “I must see him!” Psyche insisted. “I must help him!” “Oh, now you want to help him. I’m his mother and I have it under control, thank you very much. As I was saying, the most important quality for a woman is beauty. I’ve been so busy caring for my son that I’ve run out of my famous magical beauty cream. I’ve used it all up, and I need some more.” “Wait…you tried to cure Eros with beauty cream?” “Duh!” Aphrodite rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I need more, but it’s out of stock at, like, every store, so I need a proper substitute. The only goddess who has cosmetics I can use without my face breaking out is Persephone.” “The queen of the Underworld?” Psyche’s knees shook. “You—you want me to—” “Yes.” Aphrodite savored the fear in Psyche’s eyes. “Pop down to the Underworld and ask Persephone

Whatever.” “I must see him!” Psyche insisted. “I must help him!” “Oh, now you want to help him. I’m his mother and I have it under control, thank you very much. As I was saying, the most important quality for a woman is beauty. I’ve been so busy caring for my son that I’ve run out of my famous magical beauty cream. I’ve used it all up, and I need some more.” “Wait…you tried to cure Eros with beauty cream?” “Duh!” Aphrodite rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I need more, but it’s out of stock at, like, every store, so I need a proper substitute. The only goddess who has cosmetics I can use without my face breaking out is Persephone.” “The queen of the Underworld?” Psyche’s knees shook. “You—you want me to—” “Yes.” Aphrodite savored the fear in Psyche’s eyes. “Pop down to the Underworld and ask Persephone if I can borrow a little of her beauty cream. You can put it in this.” The goddess snapped her fingers. A polished rosewood box with golden filigree appeared in Psyche’s hands. “Last chance to give up and go into exile.” Psyche did her best to hide her misery. “No. I’d rather die trying to win back Eros’s love than give up. I’ll get you your beauty cream.” “Make sure it’s the unscented kind,” Aphrodite said. “Hypoallergenic. And hurry. There’s a new play on Mount Olympus tonight. I need to get ready.” Psyche trudged out of the palace on her final quest.

For hundreds of years, Buddhist monks in Vietnam have meditated in open cemeteries, bodies of their brethren in different states of decay around them. There, they envision the same processes that will inevitably be at work upon their own bodies. Saint Benedict, a fifth-century Italian monk and scholar, authored a famous book-length Rule for living that is still followed by many monastic orders and their oblates (including Benedictines, the Trappist order that drew Thomas Merton to monastic life, and even some Buddhist monasteries). Sisters and brothers following the Rule are counseled to “keep death ever before you.” Such meditations call us to acknowledge more fully the insistent ephemerality of our existence and to live with more intention, generosity, humility, and love.

It will always be a pity that the title of this great formation [the 4th Infantry Division] was given to the scattered troops, deployed on policing duty. The matchless, professional excellence of this formation was greatly admired by the Germans - no mean professionals themselves. It is said that General Von Arnim, Commander of the German Forces in Tunis in 1943, insisted on surrendering to the 4th. His caravan is today used by the GOC of 4 Division. No wonder the Chinese were aghast at the poor “performance” of this famous formation. It is ironic that the fame of this formation is more widely known and respected by foreigners than by the Indian people. Perhaps this is the price of segregating the Army from the public, except for the annual pat on the back during the debate on defence appropriations.

We arrived from New York after a daylong slog through airports and planes and traffic. It was 10: 00 p.m. local time, but my body had no idea if it was night or day. Krishna was hungry, so I found some leftover dosa batter in the kitchen and started making one for her. Next thing I knew, my grandmother was by my side, commandeering the griddle. “Let me do it,” she said. “You don’t know where anything is.” I insisted, but she won, even though by then she cooked with only one arm, the other still paralyzed from the stroke. Then my aunt Papu came in and yelped, “You’re making your grandma cook?” She was appalled. “It’s ten at night!” Papu took over, my grandmother wouldn’t leave, and my uncle Ravi entered the fray. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re supposed to be this famous food person and you’re making these women cook at ten o’clock!” I quickly remembered how it felt to live with so many people. Every move you make is scrutinized. You get up and it’s “Where are you going?” You come back and it’s “Why are you wearing that blouse? I like the other one better.” You walk outside and someone calls from the veranda, “Don’t go that way, there’s too much sun!” It was exasperating and suffocating and God, I had missed it.

For many writers the hardest part of writing is the opening line. I wish. I have hundreds of opening lines. I have a file on my laptop dedicated to nothing but opening lines. I have enough opening lines to fill two complete volumes, if only I could find a way of joining them all together. Nor is my problem the famous 'Writer's Block'. Tania always said I suffered the exact opposite, she used to call it 'Writer's Diarrhoea'. No, for me it's the voices. The incessant voices that clamour for my attention, jabbering, making demands. To which ones do I listen? Do I listen to the characters in my comics who all seem to have their own opinion as to how they see my plots unfolding? Or do I listen to the ones that tell me to take all my clothes off in the Bluewater Shopping Centre and sing Bohemian Rhapsody from the upper balcony? In retrospect it seems such a simple choice but at the time I was slightly confused. Or mildly bewildered as I prefer to call it and not the alcohol induced borderline schizophrenic the therapist insisted on labelling me. Such an unfriendly label I feel.

Felix.” She let go, suddenly shy to speak. But that tense, tickly sensation running from her throat to her belly was giving her some kind of superhuman nerve. And besides, he wasn’t really Felix Callahan anymore, not in that ethereal, big-screen sense. So. She cleared her throat. “Felix, will you be my friend?” He did laugh at her, though he didn’t seem to mean it. “Yes, we’ll get matching lockets holding strands of each other’s hair.” “I wish the English language gave us a better option. ‘Pals,’ ‘chums,’ ‘buddies’ . . . but a word that implies the sudden and unusual nature—like ‘metabuddies.’ ” “ ‘Metabuddies.’ Wow. This is getting serious.” “So?” “So. Yes. Let’s be friends. That would solve some of this confused muss. Do we spit in our palms and shake?” “I think this calls for a pinky pledge.” She hooked her pinky around his. “I, Becky Jack, agree to be Felix Callahan’s pal, even though he’s way overrated as an actor and screen hunk and can be such a brat.” Felix cleared his throat. “I, world-famous and fabulously wealthy Felix Paul Callahan, agree to be mates with Becky, even though she wears grandmother shoes and insists on popping out children with reckless abandon and shows no remorse for her vicious right hook.” “That was very nice. I almost shed a tear.” “Apparently all it takes to make you weep is a singing puppet.” “Hey, don’t sell me short. I also cry at talking socks and animated washcloths.” “You cry in terror.” “Well, yeah, that’s true.

Yes. It was awful. What sucks even more is that it happened at 'World Famous San Diego Zoo,' that whore of a tourist attraction that insists on forty-seven billboards on every highway and nonstop advertising loops on radio and television.

1963 March on Washington. Mahalia Jackson sang a triumphant “How I Got Over,” recalling the storefront singer of her youth and not the officious matriarch of national television. But she did more than set the crowd up for Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech. When Dr. King’s first paragraphs didn’t excite, the showman in Mahalia instructed her to go with the hits. “Martin, tell them about the dream,” she kept repeating until he got the message. Without her insistence, America would not have heard his most famous words.

On the afternoon of August 9, hearing the news that Nagasaki had been bombed, Emperor Hirohito called an imperial conference at which his ministers debated the wisdom of surrender. After hours of talk, at 2 a.m. Hirohito stated that he felt Japan should accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, terms of surrender proposed in late July by Truman (who had only become president on Roosevelt’s death in April). But Potsdam called for the emperor to step down; and his ministers insisted that their acceptance depended on Hirohito being allowed to remain as sovereign—an astute demand that would ensure a sense of national exoneration. James F. Byrnes, the U.S. secretary of state, did not deal directly with this, and on August 14 Japan surrendered at Hirohito’s command. The next day, the entire country heard with astonishment the first radio broadcast from a supreme ruler, now telling them squeakily, in the antiquated argot of the imperial court, that he was surrendering to save all mankind “from total extinction.” Until then, Japan’s goal had been full, all-out war, as a country wholly committed; any Japanese famously preferred to die for the emperor rather than to surrender. (One hundred million die together! was the slogan.) Today the goal was surrender: all-out peace. It was the emperor’s new will. Later that day a member of his cabinet, over the radio, formally denounced the United States for ignoring international law by dropping the atomic bombs. In 1988, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the mayor of Nagasaki accused Hirohito of responsibility for the war and its numerous atrocities, he inadvertently stirred up petitions for his own impeachment, and nationwide protests and riots calling for his assassination. A month afterward, in January 1989, Hirohito died at age eighty-seven, still emperor of Japan. Eleven days later the mayor, whom the Nagasaki police were no longer protecting, was shot in the back. He barely survived.

Some women chose to embody this new form of physical empowerment & transformed their words into actions. Exhibition boxer Minnie Rosenblatt Besser had spent years training in the manly art of boxing. She promised to meet any willing opponent, male or female, in the ring. Besser specifically called out several famous male boxers but insisted that she was most anxious to meet Brooklyn boxer Eddie Avery, who had been arrested for wife-beating. Besser explained, 'Any man who will strike a helpless woman I believe to be a coward. Should Avery pluck up enough courage to meet me I think I will prove the truth of this proposition to the world at large.

On March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists. In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself. That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.”2 For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism. Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian writer, is a leading proponent of the increasingly popular notion of "civic nationalism." He defines a civic nation as "a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values." … Defenders of this myth often cite 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan's famous description of the nation as "a daily plebiscite," a phrase that suggests that consent is indeed the source of national identity. But they rarely note that this phrase represents only one half of Renan's own definition of the nation. "Two things," Renan insists, constitute the nation: "One lies in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

From the Saturday afternoon Piper and her mother had gone to the animal shelter and spotted the little white dog with the floppy ears and a big brown patch around his left eye, they were goners. Piper had still been working on A Little Rain Must Fall, and it was the week before she attended her first---and last---Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony. She'd named the terrier Emmett in honor of the occasion, only later realizing how appropriate the moniker would be. The dog could just as easily have been named for world-famous clown Emmett Kelly. Happy-go-lucky and friendly, Emmett was very smart and responded exceptionally well to the obedience training Piper's father had insisted upon. But it was Piper's mother who cultivated the terrier's special talents, teaching him a series of tricks using food as a reward. The dog had already provided the Donovan family and their neighbors with hours and hours of delight and laughter when Terri came up with the idea of having Emmett featured in commercials for the bakery, which ran on the local-access cable channel. As a result, Emmett had become something of a celebrity in Hillwood.

Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. “What legend is more beautiful,” he writes, “than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity…However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism.” And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, “contrary to passive Christianity.” His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century – anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History fo the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history.What Michelet admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.

Jung famously said that about a third of his cases weren’t suffering from some clinically definable illness, but from a sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness. Jung believed he could help them find some meaning. It had been his own quest, and understandably he felt he could help others in theirs. In a way, one could say Jung built his Tower so he would have a safe space for himself and some selected others to go crazy, without having to deal with the incomprehension of outsiders. Most people who visited the Tower certainly felt it had an unusual atmosphere. Jung had some strange relationship with his pots and utensils; he spoke with them, believing they had souls, and required his guests to as well, and he insisted that the stove in his Küsnacht study was human.39 He also felt the same about a bronze box that stored his tobacco, and even named it Habbakuk. 40 It isn’t surprising to read that at the Tower Jung could immerse himself deeply in active imagination, often sitting for long periods in utter stillness, in a room set apart for this, where he painted his fantasies on the wall. He would see images and faces in stone and then slowly carve them; one stone in particular, a huge “perfect cube” Jung received from a quarry by mistake, became a favorite, and over the years Jung worked on it, carving on its surface alchemical, Greek, and Latin sayings.41

By the following morning, September 15, Jackson had positioned nearly fifty guns on Maryland Heights and at the base of Loudoun Heights.  Then he began a fierce artillery barrage from all sides, followed by a full-out infantry assault.  Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, Col. Miles raised the white flag of surrender, enraging some of the men, one of whom beseeched him, “Colonel, don't surrender us. Don't you hear the signal guns? Our forces are near us. Let us cut our way out and join them." Miles dismissed the suggestion, insisting, “They will blow us out of this place in half an hour." Almost on cue, an exploding artillery shell mortally wounded Miles, and some historians have argued Miles was fragged by Union soldiers. Jackson had lost less than 300 casualties while forcing the surrender of nearly 12,500 Union soldiers at Harpers Ferry, the largest number of Union soldiers to surrender at once during the entire war. For the rest of the day, the Confederates helped themselves to supplies in the garrison, including food, uniforms, and more, as Jackson sent a letter to Lee informing him of the success, "Through God's blessing, Harper's Ferry and its garrison are to be surrendered." Already a legend, Jackson earned the attention of the surrendered Union troops, who tried to catch a glimpse of him only to be surprised at his rather disheveled look. One of the men remarked, "Boys, he isn't much for looks, but if we'd had him we wouldn't have been caught in this trap." Jackson

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

He took the trophy and the mic and said, ‘Uhm,’ and then laughed, almost as if he were at a loss for words. When the presenters insisted though, he looked to the audience and thanked his crew again, Danny Boyle especially, the people of Mumbai and the optimism that he believed was the essence of the film. ‘All my life,’ he said, finally looking like he was starting to choke up, ‘I had a choice of hate and love. I chose love. And I’m here. God bless.’ Truer words he could not have spoken. At every point in his life he had faced this crucial choice. When his father died. When he had to start working before he was even a teenager. When he had to drop out of school. When he had to grow up faster than any child could have reasonably been expected to; when he had to become the man of the house at eleven, had to take care of his family. When he felt creatively stifled during his days as a sessions player and wondered if this was all his life was going to be about. When he felt his music wasn’t being appreciated widely or truly enough before Roja. When it seemed he was all alone, with no one to turn to. When he became famous. He could have chosen to be bitter, prideful or sad at every stage. But he didn’t. If not for his music, then simply for his capacity to choose light over dark, A.R. Rahman deserves every bit of adulation he got that day and ever since. His speech done, AR lowered his mic, as if not trusting himself to keep his composure for much longer, and walked off the stage.

champion is not the same as relinquishing attention to detail. The chief executive at Genentech for fourteen years, Art Levinson, was famous—and feared—for his insistence on scientific precision.

MacColl is often accused of encouraging parochialism by insisting on musicians confining their repertoire to their own place of origin. His own set lists were more eclectic: he was equally interested in Child ballads, nursery rhymes and miners’ songs, and he slipped in his own compositions too. These were by no means universally political: his most famous composition, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ – which won Roberta Flack a Grammy in 1972 after her cover version appeared in the film Play Misty for Me – commemorated his love for Peggy Seeger. The dictatorial view of MacColl largely stems from his Critics Group, instigated in 1964 as a masterclass for would-be singers, in which MacColl and Seeger could pass on their years of expertise.

From the moment the Lusitania was struck by a torpedo and two explosions ripped through its hull, Germany insisted that the ship was illegally smuggling weapons from America to Britain and thus carrying “contraband of war.